A few miles further down, the Isle of Flowers, with all its wondrous vegetation, and the many black rocks of Assouan rising from a medley of dust, Roman ruins and feathery palms were left astern; and of the long, long downward journey some 450 miles were mastered, after which lay nearly the same distance to Cairo. Often had the boats to pause in their downward way, while the melancholy duty was performed of burying those whose journey in life was over, by the river bank, uncoffined, in nameless and unrecorded graves, where the ibis stalks among the tall reeds, and the scaly crocodile dozes amid the ooze. And as the boat in which he lay under an awning glided down the Nile Jack Elliot was often in a species of stupor, and muttered at times of his boyish days at the High School of Edinburgh; of the brawling Tweed when he had been wont to fish at Braidielee; of matches at Aldershot, and clearing the hurdles in the Long Valley; but he was most often a boy, a lad again in his fevered dreams, and seeking birds' nests among the bonnie Lammermuirs, feeling the pleasant breeze that came over the braes of the Merse, while the sun shone on the pools and thickets of the Eye and the Leader; but of Maude, strange to say, or their mysterious separation, no word escaped him, till he became conscious, and then Roland would hear him muttering as he kissed her photo: 'Where are you, my darling? Shall I ever look upon your face again?' And with a wasted and trembling hand he would consign the soft leather case to the breast of his tattered and faded tunic. He was so weak, so utterly debilitated that sometimes he shed involuntary tears--a sight that filled Roland with infinite pity and commiseration, and a dread each day that he might have to leave Jack, as he had left others, in a lonely tomb by the river-side. Jack, poor fellow, was dwelling generally in a land of shadows; familiar scenes and faces came and receded, and loved voices came and sank curiously in his ear, while his apparently dying eyes and lips pled vainly for one kiss of his sunny-haired Maude to sweeten the bitter draught of that death which seemed so close and nigh. But he was still struggling between life and eternity, when in the ruddy haze Roland hailed the purple outlines of the Pyramids in the Plain of Ghizeh, the ridge of the Jebel Mokattam, the distant minarets and the magnificent citadel of Cairo. On reaching the Kasr-el-Nil Barracks, Roland was ordered to be attached for duty purposes to a regiment quartered there till further orders, as no more troops were proceeding up the Nile. Though the battle of Hasheen was to be fought and won, and the lamentable fiasco of Macneill's zereba to occur at Suakim, the war was deemed virtually over, as the cause for it had collapsed by Gordon's betrayal and the fall of Khartoum.